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Hot Exterminators

gallery

Hot Exterminators

Did someone call an exterminator? The sexy heroes of America's bed bug crisis tell their craziest and most disgusting tales of infestation.

08.26.10 2:22 PM ET

Jeff Woods

M&M Pest Control
New York

"We usually do our work when businesses are closed. One time I was at a
sushi place at 1 in the morning. I heard some noise and thought someone
was in cooking in the kitchen. I looked back there and saw a
foot-and-a-half-long rat sitting on the stove. It reminded me of
Ratatouille. This was his time to cook. Everyone had left. Everything
was clean, and the wok was sitting on the top of the stove and he was
sitting in it, like a kid in a swimming pool. I almost didn't have the
heart to catch him. I admired him. He was so ballsy."

Manuel "Junior" Medina

M&M Pest Control
New York

"The worst is clients' residences when they've had it for such a long time—they didn't know that they had it, or they did and they didn't say anything because they didn't want people to think they're dirty, or maybe they thought they were mosquitoes or heat rash. So by the time I get there the mattresses are covered in black spots and the box springs are full of eggs. They look like black ink. Bedbugs are nocturnal, but I've gone in the daytime and seen bedbugs skittering around in broad daylight, that's when you know you have a bad case."

Thaddeus Mazuchowski

NeverNest Extermination and Pest Control
Chicago

"People are the biggest nightmare-going in there and having to work
around what they had. One guy asked if I could pre-date the receipt when
one of the roaches got into a child's ear and caused an infection ...
The girl saw a doctor and he removed half of it, and then she was sent
to Children's Memorial to remove the other half."

Joshua Laboy

M&M Pest Control
New York

"The nastiest thing I've seen is walking into a basement and seeing all
these rats running overhead. No one's expecting to see that, all these
rats in the pipes over our head-what if they jump down on us? There were
probably eight to 10, about a foot long without the tail. But what I
remember is this little baby rat standing on this pipe just watching us.
He obviously wasn't afraid. They sent him out as a messenger. He just
stood there cleaning his fur, just watching us. The restaurant had said
they had a 'minor rat problem.'"

Susan Fries

"A woman called and said she wanted the exterminators to remove the bugs
inside of her head. She goes, 'Hi, I have bugs in my head and I want you
to come out and take care of it.' I said, 'That's not something we do.'
That seemed like a medical problem, and we asked if they had any roach
issues. And then we just asked questions on whether she had a roach
problem or an earwig problem. We didn't end up doing the roach job for
her."

Cesar Soto

Freedom Pest Control
New York

"I've had a lot of females who say they can't afford treatment; I've
never taken them up on the offer ... There was this one girl, pretty, as
we would say, but there was just something wrong with her. She need us
to get rid of a mouse in her bedroom and asked how much it was going to
cost....She was like, 'Look, just get rid of the mice and if you want to
hang out for a while, hang out.' She went into the bathroom and changed
her clothes, and when she came out she has this flimsy T-shirt on, no
bra. The mouse was supposedly under the bed, and when I went under there
I found used condoms, female tissues, a box of chicken. I though, this
chick is a pig and God only knows who is sleeping with this girl. She
had like thousands of droppings all around her bed."

Ivan Almanzar and Oladipo Williams

Assured Environments
New York

On occasion a few bedbugs hitch a ride home. On one job, Ivan Almanzar
took off his clothes to jump into the shower and found some dead roaches
in his underwear. During Oladipo Williams' first week on the job, he had
to help rid a NYC restaurant of rats. They set about 70 rat snap traps
in the ceiling and as they were packing up to leave, traps started going
off every few seconds. They got back up into the ceiling and pulled out
35 rats that night. He'd never done pest control before and after that
job, wasn't sure this was the field for him."

Curtis Krell

EnviroPest
Denver

"I walked in on a guy that was dead for three days. We could smell him
from the hallway. He had been there for so long that his bodily fluids
had oozed out onto his recliner chair and were starting to stain the
ceiling on the apartment below."

Henry James, The Exterminators (comic)

Bug-Bee-Gone

"Humans arrived late in the game. We planted ourselves firmly at the top of the food chain and then bred out of control. Adapting to live in and then destroying just about every natural environment on earth. We're now well on our way to rendering the planet uninhabitable—even for ourselves. Nature wants to get rid of us. And that's where we come in. Day in, day out, on the front lines, fighting nature for your fuck-ups and the survival of the human race…"